Everybody's Working for the Weekend

Ah, crap. I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't flag that Maclean's piece about the adjuncts for the added reason that it tells a story of a philosopher working in a call center part-time to make ends meet. God damn. That really just means you're in the wrong business.

Am I Good Enough for You to Love Me Too?

Maclean’s, which purports to be a Canadian news weekly, has an interesting piece by Sandy Farran about adjunct teaching. It’s broadly sympathetic to the plight of adjuncts (who Canadians seem to call “sessionals”), and that’s as it should be. As Farran makes clear, universities are relying more and more on adjuncts to teach, and they’re doing so precisely because they can pay adjuncts a lot less than they pay janitors. This trend, for a pile of reasons I’ll come back to if I ever get the chance, is a very bad thing. But for now I want to highlight something else about the piece.

Notice how Farran treats one adjunct’s effort to get a tenure-track job in his department:

Last year [Dube, an adjunct political scientist at the University of Calgary] applied for a tenure-track position in political science and he was shocked to learn that he hadn’t even made the short list. “I put a lot of hope into getting that job,” says Dube. . . Given that Dube earned $26,652 last year, a higher salary would have made a big difference.

Farran passes this story along without comment, implicitly asking us to feel this adjunct’s disappointment and the unfairness of his situation. I mean, it is unfair, right? The guy’s worked hard for that department, he’s good enough at his job, so why shouldn’t that tenure-tack job be his to lose? Suppose he was working on temp contracts as a high school history teacher. He’s a good teacher, a smart and likable guy, and kids respond to his classes. So when the permanent job comes up, it’s his. Fair enough, right?

Wrong. That’s just not the way the job market works. I mean, given that Dube “admits that he has done little research” in nearly 20 years, his reaction is insane. It’s just bat-shit crazy to think he had a shot at that job.

But there’s a bigger point here about the job market, a point this piece misses by a wide, wide margin. Being good enough might get you a job as a high school history teacher, or a junior HR consultant or whatever. But why would an academic department hire someone who was only good enough when they could hire the best available? PhDs from the best universities in the world—PhDs with hyper-active research programs and solid track records in teaching—those PhDs are going to apply for that job. Just being good enough doesn’t even put you in the running. It gets you adjunct work. Which is to say, being good enough gets you sweet fuck all.

Hosanna

When I started in my department, there were a few senior grad students who went out of their way to make me feel at home. One guy in particular, M, was always willing to shoot the shit with me about philosophy, even though I didn’t really know anything. And he was a guy who could give me good political advice about how to deal with some of the more erratic members of our senior faculty. I really looked up to M.

M’s bounced from one-year to one-year since finishing our program. He’s gone on the market four times now, trying to get something tenure-tracked. One year, he applied to over 100 jobs, and he even got a campus interview for one. But that’s the closest he’s come. This year he didn’t get a single APA interview, but I saw him there anyway, without any hope left, still waiting for a last minute interview that wasn’t going to come.

Now I’m starting to hear that this year was M’s last. He’s done. For more than a decade of his life he aimed at being a philosopher, but that’s done. I haven’t seen him for a couple of months, so I don’t know what he’s going to do. If I were him, I wouldn’t know what I was going to do. What do you do when you come to a dead end in life?

It’s Easter, and a Catholic friend of mine says this is a time to be mindful of rebirth, a time to believe in the possibility of renewal. So M, this Easter I’m thinking of you, and hoping you’re finding a way to build a new life outside of philosophy.

Rocking the Passive Voice V

I’m never going to get through these if I don’t pick up the pace.

Thanks you for your interest in the rank open position in our department. I’m sorry to have to tell you the that position has now been filled.

The first thing to notice is the obvious lie involved in this person expressing regret about filling the department’s position. Of course he’s not sorry about that at all.

I know, I know. You’ll say he’s really just expressing regret that he has to tell me about it. But is that any better? It just means that, literally, this sentence expresses the guy’s regret that he happens to have a shitty job to do—namely, telling me that I didn’t get any job at all. Wow, that must be really hard for him, the poor fucker. I’m sure you all feel as sorry for him as I do.

But there’s also something else in this letter. Notice the gibberish in the first sentence. What the fuck is a “rank open position”? It’s nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing. I know what an “open rank position” would be, and I know what a “junior rank, open position” would be. But this neither of those. This is just a meaningless string of words written by a fucktard too lazy to proofread the PFO he’s sending to over 300 losers.

Time to Get on the Internet, Take Stock of What I've Done IV

Okay, time for me to give a few departments their propers for putting together some good on-line application sites. There were a couple of nice sites, and they should be models for others who want to put together on-line applications.

First, the good sites make you enter only a minimal amount of information about your application by hand. It’s all and only the information the department needs to give a quick look over your application—your name, your school, your AOSs and AOCs, and your letter writers. If they want to know what your dissertation’s about, or what you’re presented on or what publications you have, they’re willing to look at your CV. And most importantly, they don’t give you pages and pages of idiotic questions about who your uncles are, or whether or not you’re a serial killer.

Second, the good sites let you attach all the documents in your application on a single page. They just give you a bunch of fields to put attachments in, and let you upload what you want in the order you want to do it. They don’t insist, e.g., that one field has to have a list of your publications, and then not let you attach your writing sample until you’ve done the list of publications. (What? No writing samples allowed until you have at least one publication?)

And finally, when you have all your documents attached on a single page, the good sites let you upload them all with a single click. This one’s so fucking obvious, I really don’t understand why it was so rare. But it was. So for those departments whose applications sites got this one right, nice work. You saved a tree, and you made my life a little easier.

Time to Get on the Internet, Take Stock of What I've Done III

Let me go back to the on-line applications for a moment. In my first two posts on this, I was lamenting the shitty, off the shelf human resources website that most schools with on-line applications seem to use. But what about the departments that don’t use the shitty, off the shelf human resources website? I’ll get to some more general comments later, but for now let me make one complaint.

Most schools ask you to fill in information about who your letter writers are. I mean, that information is already on your CV, but it makes sense to fill it in again. I assume departments want that information in a nice, standardized, readable form, because they’re going to skim it over and look for letters from people they know or respect.

But one department—honestly, I can’t remember which one—asked for my letter writers’ e-mail addresses too. And then, when I submitted my application, it sent each of my letter writers an automatically generated e-mail, telling them to get their letters in. Yes, it spammed my committee.

Look, I’m not accustomed to getting up in people’s faces about the treatment of senior faculty, because on the whole, they’re treated pretty fucking well. But in this case, whoever that department is, you need to cut that shit out. Seriously. My committee has better things to do with their time than clearing your fucking spam out of their inboxes.

What the photo fails to capture is the abject fear and desperation in the air.

The Eastern APA—the December conference where most of the hot job market action goes down—is legendarily stressful for job market candidates. But a special kind of APA hell is the smokers. Smokers are nightly cocktail parties held in the conference hotel’s ballroom. (Apparently they used to be really smoky, back in the day. You know. Back when people used to smoke. We’re nothing if not creative with our naming, we philosophers.)

The purpose of the smokers is to give job candidates an opportunity to mingle, in a more informal setting, with people from the departments that are looking to hire them. But the thing is, most philosophers don’t do informal so well. We’re perfectly capable of ripping each other new assholes in formal situations, like when we’re commenting on each other’s work and whatnot. But we're not so good with the mundane chitchat. Especially not when the stakes are so high.

I had to be all surreptitious in taking this photo, so there’s not much in it that’s recognizable. But you can sort of make out the suits and nametags. And the complete lack of women. Imagine, if you will, a room full of thousands of socially retarded academics, sipping warm shitty beer, and trying their very hardest to make small-talk. “Awkward” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Worn me down like a road, I did everything you told

Note to journal editors: If you want me to prepare a manuscript for blind review, you should tell me that. Also, you should absolutely not send me a style guide that tells me explcitly to put my name and contact info in all caps directly under the title of my paper. Because that's not very blind, is it now?

Time to Get on the Internet, Take Stock of What I've Done II

Yesterday, I talked a little about on-line job applications, and about the shitty, off the shelf human resources web-site than most schools use. Let me pick up where I left off.

When you’ve filled out all the various questions about your past criminal dealings, you actually get to submit your application. Super. It ought to be easy, right? You just upload the various pieces of your application package as attachments.

The thing is, this shitty, off the shelf human resources web-site was obviously designed by someone who has some serious OCD issues about on-line communication. You need to imagine our human resources guru sitting in his cubicle and working himself into a nervous fit about sending a spreadsheet to his to boss. “The “attach file” field says the file is attached, but what if it really isn’t? How can you know for sure? Oh, sweet Jesus, there’s no way to know for sure. There’s no way to know for sure.”

So, when our man got the gig designing the shitty, off the shelf human resources web-site, he made damn sure us applicants wouldn’t have to go through the sweaty-palmed horror he knew so well. Consider how files must be attached. You start with your first file, say, your cover letter. Then:

Step 1. You browse for your cover letter and you find it.

Step 2. Like with the crappier webmail applications, even when you have the file in the “attach file” field, you have to click a separate button to attach the file. You click. You think you must be done, but you’re very, very wrong.

Step 3. You get a pop-up window asking you if you really want to attach the file. (Our man thinks this little baby is a nice touch.) Of course you want to attach it, so you click to confirm.

Repeat steps 1 through 3 for every document in your application, going through the process 5 to 7 more times. Now you’re done, right? Oh, no. Not by a long shot. Because this is just where our man really started to work his magic.

Step 4. Click to confirm that you’ve uploaded everything you want to upload. Surely, this has to be the end. But no.

Step 5. Your last click takes you to a page where you're invited to make changes to what you've uploaded. You know, in case you just now realized your file called “CV-Dec 2006.rtf” is in fact one of the more experimental chapters in your erotic autobiography. Of course you don’t want to make any changes. Why the fuck would you? It was hard enough to get this fucking far. So you confirm that you’re application’s complete.

Congratulations, you're half an hour closer to death. Now you just need to do it again for the other five on-line applications you’re doing today.

Time to Get on the Internet, Take Stock of What I've Done I

I've complained at various points about the amount of work that goes into each application. One of the most surprisingly labor-intensive parts of the process for me was endless list of on-line applications. I just had fantod-inducing flashbacks of this as I stared in paralyzed confusion at the 11-page on-line submissions process for a journal I'm sending a paper to.

The thing about on-line applications is, they mean that even when you have your application package complete, an application still isn't a simple matter of stuffing an envelope and getting it in the mail. No, the first thing you need to do is create an account on the application web-site. And--this is one of the really puzzling parts--even though the overwhelming majority of schools use the same shitty, off-the-shelf human resources web-site, you need to create a new account for each school you're applying to.

When you have your user name, the next thing is to answer pages and pages of questions. I mean, there's the stuff you'd expect--name, school, department's address, your e-mail, that sort of thing. But this shitty, off-the-shelf human resouces web-site is pretty clearly what schools use for applications for any and all jobs at the university, which means most of the questions you have to answer are pretty fucking stupid in the context of an application for an academic position.

Here's a couple of examples. Almost all the schools have questions about whether you have any relatives working at the university. Okay, so they're worried about nepotism. Fine, but you know what? I don't think anyone's going to get hired as the new assisstant professor of philosophy because his uncle works for the groundskeeping crew.

The questions about your criminal record are even better. Do you have a criminal record? If so, what's it for? A little light drunk-driving would be fine, they seem to imply. But if you got caught with your pants down in a broom closet with a Sunday-school kid, that's another story.

Next-time: You thought uploading attachements was easy. . . .